On Feb 6, 2011, at 12:46, Michael Dickens wrote:

> This method of requiring Boost (with Boost::Python) and PythonXY is fragile 
> and can easily be messed up by the user without him/her realizing / knowing 
> it -- the same can be said for various ports that use +x11 and +quartz (and, 
> probably, others).  For example, I could do "sudo port install boost 
> +python27" and then "sudo port install PlasmaClient" and the Portfile would 
> work -- building or running might not work, but the Portfile won't know any 
> better.  And, doing so will only confuse the end-user and probably even the 
> owners of the various ports.

I had not thought about that... if that's true, that's not good. It all comes 
back to variants not being very helpful when it comes to dependencies. You 
can't depend on a variant of a port, which is ticket #126 and the reason for 
the workaround code in PlasmaClient et al -- but even if you could, you can't 
have different versions of a port (with different variants) active at the same 
time, so it wouldn't work to have one port that is using boost +python26 and a 
different port that's using boost +python27. Best would be if boost's python 
support were separated into ports for each version of python (e.g. py26-boost, 
py27-boost) which ports could then depend on as needed. But I don't know if 
boost's build system makes that easy to do.



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